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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 4651078 | The only possible explanation for the absence of a proactive word to express nonviolence is that not only the political establishments but the cultural and intellectual establishments of all societies have viewed nonviolence as a marginal point of view, a fanciful rejection of one of society's key components, a repudiation of something important but not a serious force in itself. It is not an authentic concept but simply the abnegation of s.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| af47ac1 | Literary Teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiated gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d02b74d | Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake - you invade a country without understanding its music. - Norman Mailer | engagement even-with heritage relevance | Mark Kurlansky | |
| 4e1269e | It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world's religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion - one receiving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfec.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 20c81cd | The nature of the precious liquid from which purple came would not be entirely understood for another two millennia. In 1826, a twenty-three-year-old student at the Ecole de Pharmacie, Antoine Jerome Balard, after studying the composition of salt marshes, concluded that the blackish-purplish, foul-smelling liquid present in marsh water, the residue water from which salt crystals had formed, was a previously unidentified chemical element. Be.. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 6007566 | Anthimus's pronouncement on garum has echoed through Western cooking: "Nam liquamen ex omni parte prohibemus," We ban the use of garum from every culinary role." | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| e3cc9ca | The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| dd1e0b3 | This is New York: skyscraper champion of the world where slickers and know-it-alls peddle gold bricks to each other and where the truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye. --BEN HECHT, Nothing Sacred, 1937 | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 6248757 | I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f43cb09 | Chloride is essential for digestion and in respiration. Without sodium, which the body cannot manufacture, the body would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart. An adult human being contains about 250 grams of salt, which would fill three or four salt-shakers, but is constantly losing it through bodily functions. It is essential to replace this lost salt. A | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| f05b4ac | In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7cbea9e | Paocai that is eaten in two days is obviously more about flavor than preserving. After two days the vegetables are still very crisp, and the salt maintains, even brightens, the color. Zhacai is made with salt instead of brine, alternating layers of vegetables with layers of salt crystals. In time a brine is formed from the juices the salt pulls out of the vegetables. When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year .. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 7e30726 | In 1928, Celulosa Cubana, S.A., founded by sugar tycoon Manuel Rionda, began making bagasse paper in Tuinucu, Cuba. | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| d54f8c2 | Peace at Once, | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 5e4a6c8 | Seconds before, we were a boy and a girl standing next to each other. The distance between our bodies was out of habit and not out of lack of curiosity. His movement was swift and unexpected. I remembered the smell of his clothes--his mom, like mine, must have used Tide--as the first of the atmospheric changes. The second was the instant warming of the air temperature as his breath came near. The third was that it became suddenly dark. As W.. | Monique Truong | ||
| a9fdf34 | We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves. | Monique Truong | ||
| b3fa457 | Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Ma. | Monique Truong | ||
| ede0b58 | He wrote that it would have been better for me to hear it all in person. What he meant was that paper was not strong enough to bear the weight of what he had to say but that he would have to test its strength anyway. | Monique Truong | ||
| 00f63d4 | The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words 'disappear' and 'point,' as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down. Small children understood this better than adults, this irreparable diminution of the s.. | Monique Truong | ||
| 43b1e08 | Lovers who have lived a lifetime together have the luxury of never having to say anything new. | Monique Truong | ||
| 5176810 | Such a "match," even if identified, would only allow me the illusion of communication and you the illusion of understanding. I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we all haven't tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feed not so alone in the world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to on.. | Monique Truong | ||
| d8d747c | I had forgotten how different my language looks on paper, that its letters have so little resemblance to how they actually sound. Words, most I had not spoken for years, generously gave themselves to me. Fluency, after all, is relative. On that sheet of paper, on another side of the globe, I am fluent. | Monique Truong | ||
| 8c8a7d2 | Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them. | Monique Truong | ||
| f2e6abf | And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am. | Monique Truong | ||
| 9ddd32d | My self-righteous rage burns until I am forced to concede that I, in fact, have told them nothing. This language that I dip into like a dry inkwell has failed me. | Monique Truong | ||
| 5ecf6e5 | When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: "The French are all right in France." What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in the colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth." | Monique Truong | ||
| 61b3f93 | Every day when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man, anonymous, and, at a passing glance, a student, a gardener, a poet, a .. | Monique Truong | ||
| 2f67335 | Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe! | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| bb5bf4a | So she fixes things by thinking about them! | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2be98f5 | Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and cog.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| aea88f2 | Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would create a very considerable deceleration. Indeed, as a calculation quickly shows, too much deceleration. We would perhaps survive; our humans, not. So the more complicated solution of gravitational drag must be studied. Would however have been intere.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e7f8716 | And analogies were mostly meaningless--a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 415d2b5 | The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. | politics | Kim Stanley Robinson | |
| 2674db7 | Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2427cf1 | Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 5e45261 | To her data analysis was the ugly love child of science and Kafka, | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 615a12b | I guess you'll have to try to do something with F's moon now. Presumably it's dead. Or even try E." He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. "Well, no. It's too big. Too heavy." Two minutes later: "Maybe you can just keep living on the ship, and stock up on whatever you run out of, from here and from E. Terraform F's moon if you can. Or maybe you can resupply and get to another system entirely. I seem to recall there's a G star just a few m.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| e6e9b1d | Bugs like these we've got here, you aren't going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it's too late, if you get a bad result. You're out of luck then." Long silence as he walked south along the beach. Then: "It's too bad. It really is a very pretty world." Later: "What's funny is anyone thinking it would work in the first place. I mean it's obvious any new place is going t.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 045d566 | Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| f39bd95 | Bad things don't just grow on one path, they're everywhere. So don't blame yourself when those things happen. Don't let yesterday take up much of today. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 1fd0cee | Chalmers stopped listening and let his gaze wander over the new city. They were going to call it Nicosia. It was the first town of any size to be built free-standing on the Martian surface; all the buildings were set inside what was in effect an immense clear tent, supported by a nearly invisible frame, and placed on the rise of Tharsis, west of Noctis Labyrinthus. This location gave it a tremendous view, with a distant western horizon punc.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 47b695f | So now as always you could get AAA ratings, not for subprime mortgages, obviously bad, but for submarine mortgages, clearly much better! And the fact that all submarine properties were in some sense extremely subprime was not mentioned except as one aspect of the very lucrative risks involved. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 2662d31 | The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons--on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees Celsius in one day. Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical compos.. | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 589cac4 | omnipresent sublime, | Kim Stanley Robinson |